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Even before announcing the normalization of its relations with Israel, Morocco launched a reform that some described as a “tsunami”, which will soon include the history and culture of the Jewish community in the school curricula of the country where Islam is the state religion.
According to the Moroccan Ministry of Education, the first Arabic language lessons will be given from the next semester in the last year of the primary stage, when the age of the students is about 11 years.
The secretary general of the Jewish community in Morocco, in a telephone conversation with Agence France-Presse in Casablanca, said that its inclusion “is the first in the Arab world. It is equivalent to a tsunami.”
The “Jewish tributary” of Moroccan culture appears in the art of architecture, cuisine, and music, and is now present in the new elementary-level civic education curricula in a chapter dedicated to Sultan Syed Muhammad bin Abdullah, nicknamed Muhammad III.
This Alawite sultan chose the port of Essaouira and its castle, which was built by Portuguese colonialists, to establish the city, which formed a diplomatic and commercial center, and for which it became the only city in the Islamic world that includes a Jewish majority. , with the presence of 37 churches in it.
“Although the Jewish presence in Morocco preceded the 18th century, the only reliable historical elements date back to this period,” said Fouad Chafiqi, director of school programs at the Moroccan Ministry of Education.
Exception
In the Arab world, Morocco remains a rare case, as “this country has never erased Jewish memory,” according to Zohoor Rehihel, curator of the Moroccan Jewish Museum in Casablanca, which is unique in the region.
Jews have been present in Morocco since ancient times and their number in this country is the highest among the North African countries. It has been on the rise over the centuries, especially with the arrival of Jews expelled by the Catholic kings to Spain, starting in 1492.
The number of members of this community reached about 250,000 at the end of the 1940s, and at that time they constituted 10 percent of the total population. Many Jews left Morocco after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, reducing their number to three thousand.
The inclusion of the Jewish heritage in the Moroccan educational curriculum is part of a broad curriculum reform program that began in 2014.
The reform, which received little internal comment, was welcomed by two American-based Jewish societies: the Sephardic Union of America and the Conference of Presidents.
The two organizations highlighted in a statement posted on Twitter in mid-November that “allowing Moroccan students to know their entire history in terms of tolerance is a vaccine against extremism.”
Shortly after, the Moroccan Minister of Education signed a collaboration agreement with two Moroccan Jewish societies “to promote the concepts of tolerance, diversity and coexistence in schools and universities.”
In a symbolic gesture, the agreement was signed at the Essaouira House of Memory, a museum dedicated to the coexistence between Jews and Muslims, in the presence of the advisor to the Moroccan monarch André Azoulay, a Jew who dedicated his life to promoting religious tolerance.
Variety
Muhammad Hatami, 4, a history teacher specializing in this subject, believes that the inclusion of Jewish identity in the curriculum “will allow new citizens to realize their diverse heritage.”
Shafiqi underlines that the change of the curricula of the primary stage aims to “shed light on the diversity of Moroccan identity”, noting that the revision of the curricula of the secondary stage scheduled for 2021 will also indicate “this dimension diversity “.
Rumors were circulating about the inclusion of the Holocaust in the school’s educational programs in September 2018 after a message to King Mohammed VI during a United Nations roundtable at the time.
That day, the king, a great defender of coexistence, highlighted the fundamental role of education in the fight against racism and anti-Semitism.
With the insistence of the Moroccan monarch, and after several months of negotiations under the auspices of the administration of US President Donald Trump, Morocco this week became the fourth Arab country to announce the normalization of relations with Israel, in exchange for the US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.
